UCSC cancer center gets $5.6 million stimulus from White House

UCSC graduate students Zack Sanborn, Steve Benz, Chris Szeto and postdoctoral researcher Jing Zhu in their office on Wednesday. The group was just awarded a $5 million dollar grant for their work on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

SANTA CRUZ -- A cancer research center at UC Santa Cruz has landed $5.6 million in federal stimulus money, one of the more than 12,000 grants totalling $5 billion that President Barack Obama announced Wednesday to create jobs in medical research.

The cancer center is home to a mega computer lab that peers into the genetic blueprint of tumor cells to pinpoint deadly mutations. Each week, about 78,000 biomedical researchers worldwide log on to the online UCSC Genome Browser, which displays genetic information from tumors as a color-coded "heat map."

The Cancer Genome Data Analysis Center will use the stimulus money to hire three more engineers and a cancer genome specialist.

UCSC professor David Haussler, the lab's leader, says there's been an extreme interest in his project among graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

"There's a new possibility for tackling a disease that's so devastating," Haussler said. "They want to make a difference."

Cancer is caused by mutations in the body's DNA, mostly acquired after birth. Though sometimes benign, the mutations can coax cells into replicating with abandon, forming a tumor.

One way good cells can turn cancerous, for example, is by blocking the body's natural self-destruct mechanism, called apoptosis, which usually kills off rogue cells. A mutation will disable apoptosis, leaving tumor cells free to multiply. Haussler wants to track down these sorts of pathways to cancer -- and there are some 7,000 in his software -- so that drugmakers can better target their roots.

Learning which pathways cause cancer could lead to tailored cancer therapy -- a task that hasn't been easy in the past because two patients could have the same cancer, but one may have a defect on chromosome 17 and the other on chromosome 3. But breast cancer researchers, for instance, are already beginning to pinpoint common pathways in breast cancer tumors.

That means two women with breast cancer could get their genomes sequenced and receive different treatments tailored for their DNA, rather than a one-size-fits-all chemotherapy. Haussler wants to expand that ability to more types of cancers.

"It sounds like science fiction to have individualized cancer therapy, but that's already the way we're going in breast cancer," Haussler said.

The meteoric growth in DNA sequencing technology over the past two years -- overtaking computer chip growth -- is giving momentum to genetic research.

"We are about to see a quantum leap in our understanding of cancer," said National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins said in a statement Wednesday.

"We're at the forefront, and the current administration is very aggressive in pursuing this," Haussler said. "Now is the time."

Haussler wants to expand his cancer center to study more than 20 types of cancer, including ovarian cancer and glioblastoma, the brain cancer that afflicted Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Part of the new grant will also be used to upgrade the lab's 1,000 computers, which handle billions of bytes of data to study just one tumor.